A Dog's Way Home review: Four legs good in corny but heartfelt adventure tail

Dogs must get sick of playing the same roles. Dog meets boy, boy loses dog, dog treks across hundreds of kilometres of badlands to find boy, fighting bears and wolves or even worse, bushfires. This has been going on for almost a century.

Bella (Shelby) is the undisputed star of the film.Credit:James Dittiger

The great dog movie stars of yore had to suffer the same bad scripts, the same awful dangers – and for a dog, those dangers are not make-believe. When Rin Tin Tin ran through a burning forest in one of his early movies, it was a real burning forest to him. Never mind that he had been well-trained to do so.

Spike, the Labrador cross that played Old Yeller in the 1957 Disney movie, had to fight a "wolf" and a bear for his role. And these canine actors do it because all dogs want to please their masters. Spike was a rescue dog who had a long career, so maybe he suffered no ill-effects, but anyone who loves dogs has to ask why we put them through the same dangerous stunts year after year for entertainment.

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Bella visits a veterans' hospital in A Dog's Way Home.Credit:James Dittiger

Things have improved greatly, in terms of what trainers are allowed to do with dogs (and let's not mention horses) in movies, but that's only in Hollywood and a few countries that have more respect for animal rights. Movies are also made in countries that don't share the same scruples. Big, powerful countries.

I'm pretty sure the people who made A Dog's Way Home went out of their way not to hurt any animals. Charles Martin Smith, the director, is a specialist with animals and kids movies (he did A Dolphin Tale, and its sequel). If his name rings a bell, think of the geeky bespectacled Terry in American Graffiti and the wolf researcher in Carol Ballard's Never Cry Wolf. Smith has a thing for wilderness and half of this one is set in the Rockies, as a dog named Bella tries to cross 400 miles of mountain to get back to her human, Lucas (Jonah Hauer-King), a young man who rescued her from beneath a derelict house.

The movie is pure corn from start to finish, but in a nice way. It has a sappy soundtrack to push the emotions and it's aimed at kids from about age five to 12, so the characterisations tend towards the black and white, but there are surprises, too.

When Bella starts her long trek home through the mountains, she meets various kinds of human, most of whom are kind towards her. I was surprised to see a gay couple among them: this would not have happened if the film was made 10 years ago, and still might not have got through today at certain large-scale purveyors of mainstream entertainment for children.

A Dog's Way Home is pure corn from start to finish, but in a nice way.Credit:James Dittiger

Another surprise is the quality casting: Ashley Judd plays Lucas's mother, a veteran with PTSD, and there are small roles for Edward James Olmos, Patrick Gallagher and Wes Studi. A number of scenes take place in a veterans' hospital, with various damaged men and women responding to Bella's generous nature as an unofficial therapy dog. The notion of family is more widely defined here than in a lot of corny American kids' films.

Shelby, the cute brown dog that plays Bella, is a rescue dog herself. She is the star of the show, with expressive brown eyes and a great screen presence. The scenes involving danger – where Shelby befriends an orphaned wild cat that turns into a very large cougar – are a mixture of computer-generated and live-action images.

The film is based on a book by best-selling author W. Bruce Cameron, who seems to specialise in books about dogs. A Dog's Purpose, from a few months back, was based on one of his books. He and his wife Cathryn Michon co-wrote the scripts for both movies, and he is credited as a producer on this new one.

There's not much variation on the old themes here. What's new is the film's definition of community and family. The dog is the star, and why not? Shelby never over-does her scenes, she's incapable of being untruthful on screen – and she can hold a close-up like Norma Desmond. Four legs good.

Paul Byrnes was director of the Sydney Film Festival from 1989 to 1998. He has been a film critic for The Sydney Morning Herald for 20 years. In 2007, he was awarded the Geraldine Pascall prize for critical writing, the highest award in the Australian media for critics in any genre.